Public attitudes

What’s the use?

The reasons for preserving biodiversity are becoming more widely understood

WHEN COLIN WATSON grew up in a Yorkshire mining village just after the second world war, raiding birds’ nests for eggs was regarded as a virtuous hobby that kept boys out of trouble and did no harm. By the time Mr Watson died in 2006—after falling from a larch tree, reaching out for a sparrowhawk’s nest—the world had changed. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) had confiscated his collection of 2,000 rare birds’ eggs and he had been convicted six times and fined thousands of pounds.

The shift in humanity’s approach to the natural world is in part the result of a long, slow evolution in moral attitudes that started long before Mr Watson’s boyhood. Its origins lie in the three great intellectual movements of recent times.

The Enlightenment changed man’s attitude to the rights of others. Once upon a time people were not expected to take the well-being of anybody beyond their family or tribe into consideration. Then the scope of moral responsibility widened to include compatriots and, later on, foreigners. More recently the circle expanded further to include other creatures, but only up to a point: few people think that animals are due the same consideration as human beings, though few now reckon they are due none at all. Compassion does not always sit comfortably with conservation (see article), but a broad concern for the welfare of other species underlies environmentalism.

In the 19th century the industrial revolution spawned the Romantic movement, which viewed civilisation as barbaric and nature as the source of all beauty: just as man started to destroy his surroundings, so he began to treasure them. Today’s environmental movement owes much to writers such as Henry Thoreau, who contrasted the shallowness of contemporary society with the spiritual depth he found living in a cabin in the woods.

Lastly, the theory of evolution undermined the Biblical notion of man as separate from, and appointed by God to have dominion over, the rest of creation. Discovering that you are an ape makes it harder to kill primates.

In the 20th century the spread of industrial farming fuelled environmental concerns. “Silent Spring”, a book by Rachel Carson published in 1962, about the impact on bird populations of DDT, a widely used pestkiller, helped foster a sense that society had got things upside down. Civilisation was uncivilised and economic growth was destroying, not creating, the things in life that were of real value.

A new sort of luxury

In the 20th century it was certainly true that economic growth was destroying nature at an unprecedented rate. But the prosperity that the growth created also gave people more freedom to think about things beyond their material welfare. Those well supplied with the necessities of life can use their resources on luxuries, be they handbags or bird-watching.

Prosperity also gave people more leisure, and enjoying nature is one of humanity’s most popular pastimes. Some 71m Americans say they watch, feed or photograph wildlife in their spare time, more than play computer games, and 34m are hunters or anglers who also, in their own way, enjoy wildlife.

George MacKerron and Susana Mourato from University College London and the London School of Economics recently looked at the relationship between happiness and nature. They found that people are happier in all outdoor environments (except in fog or rain) than they are indoors. What makes them happiest is taking exercise or bird-watching by the sea or on a mountain with someone they like. Those seeking to cheer themselves up should avoid bare inland areas, suburbia and children.

The second reason why humanity has started paying more attention to nature has nothing to do with fun or morality. It is that as people have messed up bits of the environment, they have come to understand the complexity of ecosystems as well as their importance for human welfare.

Two of the sharpest illustrations of this come from China’s Great Leap Forward. In 1958 the Chinese government announced that sparrows were to be targeted as part of the “Four Pests” campaign because they ate grain, offering rewards for killing them. People obediently tore down the birds’ nests, caught them in nets and banged saucepans to stop them landing anywhere. Sparrow numbers collapsed. But the birds, it turned out, ate insects that ate crops, and their slaughter thus contributed to the great famine of 1960 that killed 20m people.

At the time China was also stepping up its timber production, increasing the harvest from 20m cubic metres a year in the 1950s to 63m cubic metres in the 1990s. The area covered by forest shrank by more than a third over the period. The resulting soil erosion gummed up the Yangzi River. In 1998 it flooded, killing 3,600 people and doing around $30 billion-worth of damage.

The story of Newfoundland’s cod fishery offers a similar tale of self-defeating destructiveness, this time from the capitalist world. Around 1600 English fisherman reported that the cod off Newfoundland were “so thick by the shore that we hardly have been able to row a boat through them”. Factory fishing started in the 1950s, and the catch peaked in 1968 at 810,000 tonnes. By 1992, when cod biomass was reckoned to have fallen to 1% of its level before factory fishing started, the government declared a moratorium, but the cod fishery never recovered.

The reasons for the decline in populations of pollinators such as bees are less clear. According to a United Nations report, the number of honey-producing bee colonies in America more than halved between 1950 and 2007; European populations have also dropped. Pesticides, habitat loss or the spread of disease through globalisation may be to blame—nobody is sure. Whatever the explanation, the costs are potentially huge. Wild and domesticated bees as well as other insects such as hoverflies are especially important in the production of fruit, vegetables and oilseeds. According to an estimate in 2007, the global value of pollinators to farmers is €153 billion.

The potential of biodiversity for the pharmaceuticals industry is not easily quantified but hugely important. Around half of new drugs are derived from natural products. That should not be surprising: as Thomas Lovejoy, who holds the biodiversity chair at the Heinz Centre in Washington, points out, the genome of every living creature is a unique solution to a unique set of problems. So it seems likely that out there in the rainforest genomes exist that would be useful to humanity, if only humanity knew about them before it wiped them out.

The gastric brooding frog, for instance, appeared to scientists to hold great promise. This strange creature, endemic to Australia, gestated its offspring in its stomach. That suggested it could turn off production of stomach acids, which would be useful for people with stomach ulcers or recovering from stomach surgery. Research on the frog started in the 1980s, but the only two species of gastric brooding frog went extinct shortly afterwards. A scientist at the University of New South Wales is currently trying to resurrect the frog from surviving DNA.

But the services that other species perform for mankind do not stop there. Just as scientists are discovering that the human body is a huge colony of different species, with a large variety of bacteria inside every one of them, so they are finding out that the ecosystem of the soil—bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, microarthropods—is even more extraordinarily diverse. In a gram of soil there may be as many as a million species of bacteria. Their interactions with the food we eat and the air we breathe are complex and crucial to the production and maintenance of life. The combination of their importance and our ignorance suggests that humans would be wise to show humility in their dealings with other species, even when they are invisible to the naked eye.

All these factors have led to a big shift in attitudes towards nature. One of its manifestations has been a boom in green NGOs. Many trace their origins a long way back: Britain’s RSPB, for example, was founded in 1889 to campaign against women using exotic feathers in their hats, and the Sierra Club was established in 1892 to support Yosemite National Park, founded two years earlier. But the 1960s were a particularly fertile period. The World Wildlife Fund (now the Worldwide Fund for Nature) was set up in 1961, the Environmental Defence Fund in 1967, Friends of the Earth in 1969, and Greenpeace came together in the late 1960s. This was also the period when membership of some of the older organisations took off.

The NGOs have helped improve other species’ prospects in a couple of ways. Members’ contributions finance programmes, for instance to buy land, restore degraded habitat and protect species. In America and Britain, many big conservation efforts have been backed by NGOs or philanthropists. The NGOs’ lobbying efforts also make an impact. As membership of conventional parties has shrunk, theirs has boomed (see chart 2). Whether there is a causal connection—and if there is, which way the causality runs—is moot, but there is no doubt that the influence of green campaigners over mainstream politics has grown. In part, it is manifested through pressure from the NGOs on the big parties, but in some countries, such as Germany, Belgium and Brazil, it has made a difference to mainstream politics. By way of laws, regulation and subsidy, human behaviour towards other species is changing.